Final along-front transect
by Robin Faillettaz, on
This is our last sampling day and everything went fine over the last few days. But after all the troubleshoots we have been fighting (with success!), this last day could not be a usual one. The plan was to do a transect following the drifters trajectory from 36 h ago. By doing that, we would get a quite perfect along-current transect if the oceanographic conditions did not change much, which was a fair assumption. It seemed simple, but actually appeared pretty challenging since storms were expected in the early afternoon. It was 6:30 am, we had plenty of time and we decided to stick to the plan. The ship and ISIIS were set up at 7:20 am and Jessica took over for me.
A few minutes later, the weather started to become harsher and a curtain of rain along with lightning caught us. Visually amazing. Until the actual "visual" was reduced to 30 m. The captain started to be concerned about our gear and warned us that from now on, the responsibility was ours in case of damage if we wanted to keep ISIIS in the water. Surprisingly, there were no more end-of-the-cruise-tiredness-because-we-slept-about-5-hours-per-night. It was like we had drank 5 Redbulls each (although we didn't drink any… that day). Everyone has is own reaction to adrenaline. Jessica was hilarious and "sooo excited" while I was trying to figure out how I was going to pull up ISIIS on board with a limited number of bumps. Long story short, rain stopped before paying in the cable, ISIIS made it and we even got a beam of sunlight right when it landed on deck.
We could therefore finish our sampling with plankton tows on the way back, in order to compare that data with ISIIS images. This last sampling day was successful… until winds came up to 30 knots during the plankton tows and constrained us to go straight to a safe anchorage behind Lérins Islands. We stayed there the rest of the day and started packing before picking up the remaining float and glider tomorrow.